Sometimes i get to thinking it's all my mom's fault and then i realize, that i'm just a twitchy fuck.

Le Sein

My mom keeps her
spare left tit
in a shoebox
on the highest shelf
of the walk-in closet
in the master bedroom
of the house we used to own.

I’m a little bit
worried about that tit.
You see
I won’t have the kind of access
that I’m used to.
When they move on the first of
the month
I’m afraid she’ll forget it
sitting there.
Getting dusty,
because the subsequent owners
are too disgusted with it
to move said tit.

Or just as bad,
(if she brings it)
I’ll never be able to
find it in the
triplex they’re moving
into,
and it’s not like I can just ask
her where she’s hidden it.

It’s not the first nipple
I self-consciously squeezed
or anything
(she only got
these squishy funbags
when I was fifteen or so).
It’s just that

one august evening
lounging around after
a day warm enough
to actually swim,
my mom’s left tit fell off,
and the spare nearby
just enough to spur on
a suction cup race
of busty proportions.

Two perfectly matched left tits,
leaving almost identical mucus
trails down the glass sliding doors.

So the four of us:
my father, my brother,
my sister and I,
looking guiltily onward
at the slow moving consequence
of a teenager’s instinctive reactions.

Waiting for my mother’s
distraught cry over the mess,
or the destruction of her tits
which she needed to
“feel normal”
after the amputation,

but instead she
started to laugh.

I guess you could say
it was the pitcher of sangria
that she had drank,
but maybe it has more to
do with the fact that
not even mother
can hold in a laugh
while watching two tits
molded from her own
race to the bottom of her
newly polished glass doors,
to a running commentary
by her husband and children.

That’s not the weird part,

The winters of following years,
my mom wouldn’t wear
a fake tit because of
sweaters and such, so
both tits were left to
two bored sons.

Obviously one such repetition
of the event was inevitable,

that’s not the weird part.

The weird part is that
it became our ritual,
the instant the rest of
the family was out.

My brother and I
share nothing
but this fascination
with racing facsimiles
of our own mother’s breast